If you are looking to stop people-pleasing, take heart—you are not alone in this battle!
People-pleasing is a huge problem (not exclusive to women—but particularly common amongst women—and for reasons we’ll get into in a bit). It leaves a person exhausted, and burnt out and often with nothing to show for it.
If this is you, dear sister, just know that there is a way out—and it’s both easier than you think, but also a bigger and more powerful move than you could imagine.
People-pleasing is NOT kindness (although no doubt you are an incredibly kind human being!)
Many of us know this already—and while we know it on a cerebral, brain level—remnants of getting these two things conflated probably still exist in our hearts and nervous systems.
So it bears repeating: people-pleasing is not the same as kindness. And stopping people-pleasing does not make you mean and selfish.
The key difference is this: people-pleasing is done under compulsion—it feels more like something you have to do than necessarily want to do.
It’s often done out of fear or a low sense of self-worth—the feeling that ‘them being mad at you’ feels even worse than death. And so you continue to do what you have to do to feel okay.
Kindness, on the other hand, is the actions we take to benefit someone else—but done out of free will instead of compulsion. If you choose to do the dishes for your roommate because the act of doing so, and the thought of them feeling happy or relieved, genuinely brings you joy and brightens your own spirit—that is kindness. If you are doing the dishes because you don’t want her to be mad at you, or because you feel like you’d be a bad person if you didn’t—that is a totally different story.
Oftentimes the important difference between these is overlooked in favor of preserving a certain ideology. In certain religious circles, the idea of ‘stopping people-pleasing’ is akin to becoming selfish—and so people don’t do it because they don’t want to be selfish.
But the truth of the matter is—stopping people-pleasing will actually make you more kind, not less. As someone who has battled people-pleasing that has now massively lost its grip—I actually find myself having more good will toward others than less.
The deeper, cultural underpinnings of people-pleasing
If I had to trace the origins of my own people-pleasing tendencies—honestly, I think the movies and stories I consumed as a kid made a huge difference.
I’m speaking about the idea that fairytales like Cinderella have implanted in all of our minds—and I’m not just talking about the ‘find prince charming and live happily ever after’ idea we were all raised on.
On a deeper level, Cinderella teaches women that in order to get the life we want, we must remain kind, pure and chaste—until one day the divine (be it God or a fairy Godmother) deems us deserving of the life of our dreams. And of course, that dream life is provided for us by a man, not us.
Think about it for a moment—Cinderella remained kind, pure, obedient and a cheerful giver even under the influence of her abusive stepmother. And if you grew up steeped in religion like I did, those virtues sound oddly familiar, don’t they?
I was taught that my goal in life was to remain pure, kind, and obedient so that one day, God would bless me with everything I could ever dream of and more. So I spent my energy trying to be good and please a cosmic authority figure, thinking that would somehow get my needs met.
But what if Cinderella had, instead, decided one night that enough was enough? What if she had mounted her horse and rode off in the middle of the night, determined that she would find the life she were looking for on her own—not giving a damn that her stepmother and step sisters would have to sweep the chimney by themselves?
That is the alternative that we have available to us.
The fact is, nobody engages in people-pleasing because we like to harm ourselves. We engage in people-pleasing because it has been so deeply engrained in us women that we will get good things by continuing to be ‘good’.
But the reality is, people-pleasing doesn’t work because people will never be pleased. And that good life we’re after will always be a distance promise—unless we decide to take charge of our own destinies and go after what we want on our own.
How to stop people-pleasing (and never go back!)
Perhaps the first and most important step is just that—recognizing that people-pleasing doesn’t work.
Back in 2023, I had that very revelation—I thought that being what people wanted me to be, apologizing incessantly, overextending myself to keep others happy, and berating myself would reduce conflict. But after hitting the same wall, over and over again, I suddenly realized with stark clarity that this wasn’t even accomplishing the goal that I had hoped it would.
Recognizing this allows us to step back and really get clear about the real root of the problem. People-pleasing, at its core, is about safety. It’s about needing to feel secure, both in ourselves and in our relationships. And while there may have been a time in human history when this was a necessary survival tactic—in our modern day and age, people-pleasing rarely, if ever, serves us.
Because we’re a relational species, we often expect our security and stability to come from other people—and this is totally understandable. But as we continually evolve into a much more individualistic species, the need to find wholeness, stability and peace on an individual level becomes increasingly important.
All this is to say, the way to stop people-pleasing at its core is to find true, deep security within your own self.
The best way I’ve found to create inner stability is to create distance. If you’re in a situation where you normally default into people-pleasing mode, purposely take yourself into a different room. Step out for a moment. Give yourself the space to breathe.
This will send your system the message that you are not responsible for immediately stepping in and trying to fix the situation—you actually deserve the time and the space to process.
Next, once you’ve removed yourself from the situation, purposely change up the way you speak to yourself. Instead of defaulting to feeling responsible for their feelings, remind yourself that, at the end of the day, you are responsible for you, and they are responsible for them.
I’ve personally found a lot of instant peace from simply pumping myself up—literally standing in front of the mirror and telling myself that I am a badass superwoman and maybe even smudging the mirror by giving myself a high-five. Whatever works!
Doing this will send the message to your system that you are safe, secure and whole—which is why we fall into people-pleasing in the first place.
Now comes the part where you make a calm decision—from a bit of an emotional distance—to either do the thing or not do the thing. If you are going to do the dishes because you heard someone make a comment about them while you were in the bathroom—do it willingly, not compulsively. Know that you can freely choose not to do them in that exact moment if you don’t want to. Know that you can let your roommates or family or whoever know that you will get to it when you can. But the point is, whatever you do—it has to be willing. And if it is willing, it’s true kindness.
If you repeat this over time, the awesome news is your smart brain will very quickly catch on! You are capable of changing whatever habit you want to if you are consistent and don’t quit. So keep on catching yourself, stepping back and reminding yourself you have a choice in this—and make sure to celebrate your wins as you go!
What would happen if we ALL stopped people-pleasing?
What would happen if women as a whole decided enough is enough?
Well, we’re seeing some of that already—and it’s causing widespread panic over things like declining birthrates as women are choosing to put themselves first—and stay single by choice if they so please.
It’s causing something called the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ which is, obviously, gaining attention and being viewed as a problem that needs addressing. More and more women are deciding something like marriage—where they will likely have to put in more domestic and emotional labor—is not what they want for their lives.
Yes, stepping out of gendered expectations can feel scary because it will destabilize things for a bit. But the thing is—if we keep going with this, the world is eventually going to have to just get used to it. Everyone is simply just going to have to adapt.
I know that one of the things that has held me back with stopping people-pleasing is realizing that the people benefitting from it (probably without realizing they’re benefitting from it at first) will get pissed. They’ll start seeing me as ‘difficult’—a label that hurts to get slapped on you.
But honestly—people will eventually get the gist and will adjust—because that’s what people do.
And honestly, stopping people-pleasing is not ‘disrupting the peace’. If you are in a situation where you feel like you have to be the one to give more, compromise more, and bend more—there is no peace there to begin with.
If anything, stopping people-pleasing will create more peace than it takes away.
So if you want to make the decision to quit people-pleasing, just know that you are making a very powerful move—both for your own mental health and that of your sisters—who are rooting you on all the way <3
